I don't happen to agree with this guy's position. In fact I take almost the exact opposite position: Government should fund and own the lines, at least last mile, provide access to anybody who wants it for identical fees, and hire out a company or companies for maintenance work. Essentially turning Internet access into a public service.
But to me it just sounds like somebody who disagrees with me. The summary didn't call him one, but I'm pretty sure from reading his statements that he's a Republican. This is, by and large, the company line for them: Leave business alone so they can get the job done and pay people to do it.
That being the case, why shouldn't he author a bill to stop it? And why shouldn't he ask the cable companies what they think needs to be in the bill to protect them in the manner that he envisions? If his position is "government should stay the hell away from Internet access" then asking the people who provide Internet access what would (help) ensure that is not unreasonable.
We automatically jump to some sort of quid pro quo assumption. If that's true, yeah, impeach his ass -- then put him in jail. But barring evidence of that I don't have a problem with it that should lead to his impeachment. I wouldn't vote for him; not only based on his positions but based on the fact that it makes me question whether he's representing me or them. But that's a different matter, one up to the voters. It's not a criminal wrongdoing even if he IS on their side to the exclusion of mine. (Now if the state has a recall procedure that the citizens wanted to invoke, I would support such an attempt.)
In fact, didn't the system seem to work? He had his position, he asked his constituent (the cable company) what they needed, he authored a bill and put it to a vote. They voted it down and told him to take a seat. Seems like it worked like it should.
I love you so much for finding that source. I was just going to make a snarky reply about people making things up as they go to suit their arguments, but bitchslapping them with actual data is too good.
I understand where you're coming from, but I do not agree.
What a law like this is, more than anything, is a recognition of the inherently unequal balance of power in a (potential) employer-employee relationship. Here in the US we tend to pretend that it's a mostly equal relationship and that all of this sort of thing is properly evaluated as part of the proffered salary. Some people really are studly enough that they can demand and receive anything they want from any employer they want, but the vast majority of the world isn't. In fact I'd be willing to bet the majority of workers simply feel lucky to have a job at all.
That being the case, if this law is worth passing then it's because privacy is worth protecting. Creating a law demanding respect for an employee's privacy and simultaneously writing in a loophole that almost any company would be able to exploit to completely ignore it has no value. They may as well not write the law; it's not helping anybody.
When it comes to voting, quantity in and of itself is undesirable. What you need is quality. If you can have both, that's wonderful. If you must choose, quantity is expendable.
That's your opinion. It's not a bad one, not at all. In fact I am *this close* to agreeing with you.
What you're attempting to do is devise a system whereby the voters make the best choice. Ignoring the fact that that's one of the questions voting is meant to answer, that's a perfectly valid approach. After all, even if our candidate of choice doesn't win don't we want it to be because there was a difference of opinion from well-informed people rather than a slew of people voting on who has the best hair or something?
But another way of wording what you're saying is that stupid people don't deserve to be represented. It sounds perfectly reasonable that people who are illiterate, or who know nothing about the Constitution or civics or what-have-you shouldn't be involved with the construction of our government. But these people deserve to be represented. They deserve to be protected because they actually have a voice, and not because we their "betters" have deigned to protect them today. They deserve those protections even moreso when you consider that "illiterate" or "can't pass a civics test" frequently map along racial and socio-economic lines. In fact we did the whole poll/literacy testing thing in our history; it was used to prevent blacks from voting. The proposal essentially is to give the least voice to the people most likely to be helped by their government, instead preferring middle-to-upper class white guys because we know best.
I'm not accusing you or even your proposal of being racist, by the way. I fully believe you're putting it forward because you think it's the best, most reasonable system to decide who should be involved in electing our leaders and I really do respect that and your proposal in general, but I don't think the realities of the situation can be ignored. It's also worth mentioning that I've not yet brought up anything but an inherent bias in the system you proposed, whereas I think you could easily see where it could also be exploited, especially as the system establishes itself. It's a positive feedback loop for those deemed worthy: Those who have the power to vote are in charge of determining who gets the power to vote and what your exam entails. (As an aside, even your comment that "the federal government has no powers at all (AT ALL!) except those granted to it by the Constitution," while one I completely agree with, seems to be pushing an agenda of its own.) Of course that's going to be abused, and when the powerless ones feel they have no nonviolent means of correcting the issue, well, you've either made them slaves in all but name or you've forced them to violence. In all I think those are worse possibilities than the "yeah, go ahead and vote if you're 18" system gives.
There can be only one suspect for who was behind it: the U.S. government.
I know that nonsense supports some peoples' world views, but that doesn't make it accurate.
Ignoring the possibility that it could reasonably be any number of other people and even a handful of other governments, maybe I'm naive, but I don't see why the US government would play games if they really cared that much. A terrible rape allegation that doesn't even stick for a day? Please. With billions of dollars of resources they could manufacture a significantly better, more serious charge with evidence that was hard to refute.
Personally, if I were in the government and wanted to put a stop to Wikileaks I wouldn't bother with that though. You'd simply find Assange in an ally with a bullet in the back of his head. Oh, there would be an uproar for a few days, maybe a few weeks, and lots of conspiracy theories (that for a change would actually be true!) but not only would it pretty much immediately slam the breaks on Wikileaks, it would be a chilling example to anybody who might consider stepping in behind him.
The "problem" with Wikileaks is that it doesn't need credibility, making some attempt to character-assassinate Assange on the worthless side. I don't like Assange, I'm not a huge fan of Wikileaks, and while I supported what they did with the original attack video I have no support whatsoever to give to leaking the Afghanistan documents or the manner in which it was done. Even with all that said I can't find them to lack credibility. They're releasing actual government documents, actual government video. I can have a problem with what they did, I can have a problem with how they did it, I can have a problem with some of the editorializing they do, but I can't claim it's somehow not credible. Other people are roughly the same; they think Wikileaks is scum or providing a public service.
So why waste the time and effort in some really bad plot? Live with it or end it. Don't play games.
Teachers shouldn't be essentially libeled by some claim that two cherry-picked metrics has anything to do with how good of a teacher they are.
For starters there's a Garbage In, Garbage Out problem. I know it's not politically correct to say these days, but some kids are simply stupid. Some are disinterested. Some are distracted by other situations, such as things going on at home. Some have terrible parents who don't care and who consider the school district to be solely responsible for their child's education during the 8 hours they provide the babysitting service, and have no interest whatsoever what happens when the service stops and they're forced to pick their kids up and bring them home for the rest of the day. None of these are the teachers' problems, nor theirs to solve. All will show up in their "performance metrics."
Second, many of these metrics are related to or exacerbated by socio-economic conditions. Will we really be surprised when--not if--most of the "best" teachers are found in upper-middle class neighborhoods? How is it an unbiased measure of anything when you completely ignore any and every factor other than the end result of some equation?
I'll give you a hint what looking at standardized math and English test scores does: It tells you have students did on their math and English standardized tests. Anybody extrapolating anything beyond that is wholly irresponsible and downright foolish. If this forthcoming article is anything like the summary suggests, these people do not deserve to be called journalists. They're nothing but little twats who evidently did better on their English than their math tests. Must have had poor teachers.
hey have to understand what the "http" means, what the resolution order is (why "facebook.com" is very different from "facebook.com.evil.uk"), to know about fonts (to differentiate ".com" and ".corn" or ".COM" from ".C0M")
I think you're grossly over-complicating it. They don't need to know what http means. For people for whom that is too difficult a task, they should just know that it (or https) should be there. And even then I'm not really sure what kind of attack you could pull off by changing the protocol, assuming that they know the rest of the tips.
They do need to know the resolution order, but only generically. "The rightmost part of a domain is the important part of where you're going" is going to protect against the vast majority of potential attacks, and all it requires teaching is where the domain stops (the first slash after "http://").
The font thing is really contrived, and easily avoided by simply informing users that what the link says isn't always where it goes, and that they should look at their browser bar to see where it's actually pointing. In fact this is something that needs to be pointed out rather than taught, since almost all web users have seen a link in this fashion with descriptive text instead of a URL. Nobody thinks that's going to "in this fashion," whatever that is, so they already intuitively know it; they just need to be informed that it can be used for nefarious purposes and where to see what it's actually pointing at.
Can software do this? Yes. Should it? Yes. Should users rely on it? No. Making it seem like users need to attend classes in order to protect themselves from simple attacks like this is disengenuous. All it takes is a modicum of effort, which is prohibitive enough these days it seems.
A trademark also only applies where it is in the same field and where there is a risk of consumer confusion.
Unless they are claiming that god has suddenly gone into the retail electronics or computer repair business, they're doing nothing but siccing lawyers on people without justification.
Fox News is the biggest cable news network in the United States. If Newscorp is failing or underperforming (I don't know if it is, but you imply such and I'll go with that) then it's almost certainly not due to Fox News in general or Beck and O'Reilly specifically.
I had the same problem happen, with some extremely sensitive data coming in.
In addition to somewhat mundane things like airline confirmations, hotel confirmations, etc, there were several letters about legal problems. The person they were trying to reach is apparently the head of an investment group and under investigation by the SEC. I also once received an email containing a bank account number with routing number. Usually it was sent to his (proper) business address and CC'd to my address, which I assume they thought was a personal address for him. When correspondence from lawyers starting coming in I decided it was well past time to start emailing these people and telling them to oh my god please stop. That's a can of worms I just wanted no part of whatsoever.
I did do a quick Google search for the guy; same last name, different first name (same first initial, the combination of which is my email address). Really a problem that shouldn't have happened, especially not that many times from that many different sources.
Getting details wrong is bad, of course. But they're asshats deserving both scorn and outright punishment not because of the (erroneous) perception of going after IP, but because they're abusing the legal system by pre-suing with nothing but a list of John Does.
In fact, this is worse than the tactics the RIAA use. At least in their case they were using the filing because they knew who they wanted to sue by IP and needed the court's authority to turn that into a name. These guys don't know anything about anybody; they're just supposing that it's going to happen and they want to expedite the process if it does. They're abusing the legal system, period. Their case should be dismissed with prejudice and their lawyers fined for that alone.
Instead, Wikileaks simply did a cost-benefit analysis and found that the potential danger of the Taliban acquiring the documents, sifting through them, picking out suspect names, and then targeting them was not as valuable as releasing all these documents to the public.
I've made a cost-benefit analysis that finding Assange, beating him unconscious in an alleyway, spiriting him back to a shack in the woods and torturing him to death does more good than allowing him to continue to make his cost-benefit analysis'. Oh, and I'm going to take his wallet while I'm at it 'cause, I mean shit, this is a lot of work. There should be something in it for me.
because they are willing to unveil damaging secrets.
What damaging secrets? The video a few months ago, that was important. That was worth releasing. However I've seen nothing about these Afghanistan documents that is more than silly pedantry used as anti-war propaganda. An Afghan policeman got caught with hash and fired at Afghan troops? Stop the presses, there are stupid people overseas too! I mean I used to support this war but now? Ugh, let's get out!
I can't find a source anymore, but I recall hearing that good writing is strongly correlated with high intelligence. Maybe your evaluation is not as unreasonable as you suppose.
I agree. People claiming the Internet would become ubiquitous or that we would need to change how we do things to acommodate it probably had a good degree of foresight, and I will tend to agree with them.
But those claiming it would change everything about everything or that subsequent generations would be instantly computer geeks was horribly mistaken. People have always been able to appreciate the value of something without knowing (or caring) about every inner working. Not everybody is a car guy, not everybody can build a telephone, not everybody can fly a plane. Why should everybody be a computer or Internet expert?
That said, however, the comfort level is far higher. My mom is still paranoid about computers and the Internet; she hates it. She won't even get a debit card instead of her checks, much less do any sort of online banking -- even if it was only to keep an eye on her balances that way. My dad likes it, but he's hopeless and though I doubt he would admit it, I think he's afraid of making a mistake. I really don't know why. Just yesterday he forced me to help him sign up for some website like if he didn't do it right the world would end. But aaaanyway, myself and my brother are both computer geeks in differing degrees, my cousins (from 5 to 26) are all perfectly comfortable. Nobody I know from my generation is uncomfortable with it. They're not all good, but they like it and they're willing to be independent with it.
Why anybody would assume comfort would turn into mastery I can't say.
Just replying to myself because after re-reading that second paragraph it came off a little anti-homosexual. I didn't mean to imply that being gay was shameful or bad, merely that for people who already do believe that, that being associated with a gay person wouldn't be a good thing, especially given the specific circumstances of the situation I was referring to.
ask yourself a question: "why do you give a fuck what anybody finds out about you? Really?"
There are good reasons to care what people find out about you. I remember a few years ago, Ted Haggard was head of the National Association of Evangelicals, railing against homosexuals and gay marriage. Then it broke that he was paying a male masseuse for sex and meth.
Now in his case, he was still alive but imagine the same sort of thing comes to light after death instead. There's shame for his family (who presumably share his views), shame for his church, shame for the association. It destroys his credibility and undermines his church's and his organization's. Assuming he believes what he preached, it undermines his positions as well. You don't get to rail about how horrible homosexuals are, fuck your male masseuse, and claim to be some agent of God on the moral high ground.
That's just an example, of course. The point is that even if you're dead, you can still have an effect on the world and especially on your family, friends and community. A man's wife finding out he cheated on her is going to hurt her whether he's dead or not (in fact, perhaps more if he is because of the doubts it would cast on the entire relationship). And for what? It may have mattered in life, but it certainly doesn't in death.
Perhaps more to the point, that's not our decision to make. Dead or not, it's that person's life, that person's secrets. Most people won't care what people find out or think about them once they're dead, but some will -- and that's their choice. I'm not inclined to judge them for it.
I highly doubt the Supreme Court will hear the case.
To the best of my knowledge, there are not a plethora of conflicting lower court rulings on the issue. And while there is a constitutional question to be answered, I don't see it as wildly different than other cases they have decided such that it needs a separate ruling. These are the major criteria that the justices use to determine whether or not to hear the case.
Just because you are technically able to appeal up to them does not mean they will grant your petition for certiorari. In fact, about 98% of requests are not granted and their cases are unheard.
(Not necessarily a direct reply to you, just leaping off for my own experiences.)
My high school was quite affluent and always very strong academically. We were probably top 10 in the state in everything, and if I recall correctly we ended up having the most students who scored highly on the state standardized tests my junior year of high school. And thanks probably to exactly one teacher, we had what I would consider an extremely strong tech program. I think it was a really good basis for what a high school can do for the tech department, so let me share my recollections of having been involved in the vast majority of it as well as my interactions with the teacher responsible for most of it and things I've heard through him and in general.
1. Programming. We had two programming courses, one in Visual Basic (it was VB6 at the time I believe) and one in C++, and I took both. My high school was a large one; it had 3,000 students in two campuses of about 1,500 each. The year I took VB, it had three sessions (meaning about 75 students or 5% of the campus and 2.5% of the school), and C++ was worse with two sessions (about 50/3.3% of the campus). In neither one did the students really grasp anything, and most of them just talked about how much they hated it and how hard it was. The 3-4 students who actually seemed to enjoy it seldom walked out feeling like they had learned much because they were the ones who walked in interested in the subject. It wasn't a bad beginners course at all, but it struggled mightily to get anybody interested and even more mightily to get them to leave with much of value.
2. CCNA. Yup, we actually had a CCNA course. It was a heck of a commitment I admit; since it was a high school course they spread it out over four semesters, meaning you had to dedicate an elective slot to it for two of your four years at school. Still, everybody knew this in advance.
It was startlingly successful in terms of attracting students. I believe the first class had four or five sessions, so about 100-125 students. However it was not a generic networking class that perhaps it should have been; it was, legitimately, a CCNA certification program, meaning two things: First, that all of the material and exams came from Cisco and second, that it chewed up and spit out most students. They did their best to help students do well in terms of their grade in the course with a lot of fluff scores; if I remember correctly about 30% of the final mark was for periodically turning in a notebook that looked like you had done something other than sleep through the course, and though it was a CCNA prep and all the test scores came from Cisco's academy program, taking the exam was not required. It was a really good and really fun course. We had stacks of Cisco routers in the corners and frequent assignments involving programming them.
Part of the problem with this course was that the instructor I've mentioned a few times was one of two who taught it, and he wasn't the one I had. The one I had was truly terrible. I remember him teaching exactly twice; the rest of the time he was basically napping while you do the Academy coursework. To some degree this was expected (you HAD to do the Academy coursework and it was a big part of the course), but he took indifference entirely too far. Though I did well, I still felt like I was staring over when I got to the third course and back to the good teacher. And in fact that teacher felt the same way, because he planned about a week to go over CCNA 1 & 2 material but ended up taking closer to three.
By the time I got to CCNA 4, the difficulty of the course had taken its toll. The 100-125 students in CCNA 1 was down to 12 or 14 students. Technically speaking, that was against the school's policy for a course; it should have been canceled. But the teacher went to bat for us and ours was the last session of the course ever taught, having lasted 4 years (two times through the course). I was the only studen
Were you given the recording? Was it being thrown out and you salvaged it? Because absent something like that, you've stolen it -- and not in the "copyright infringement" sense of the word stole (though that will be true if you ever make a copy or play it publicly).
In your example, you assume that we needed to get electrical service out to rural areas sooner, rather than later
I'm not sure that's what he assumed. I think he's saying that you can't evaluate such a thing based on perfect hindsight. His assumption (or at least the point of conflict) would be that it's not something that should be left to chance as to whether or not the market ever decides, for whatever reason, to fill the void.
However, there are valid reasons. A sampling:
1. For the mail in particular, there is a network effect. My ability to send a letter next door is of extremely little value. My ability to send a letter to anybody in the country is significantly more valuable, and of course a tangential ability to send a letter almost anywhere in the world is more valuable yet. The more people connected to this service, the more valuable it is for each of them. This is also undoubtedly true of phone service, and true of Internet access as well.
2. Foresight. I'm sure there were skeptics, especially of whether or not something like the mail or electricity could be good businesses, but I don't think anybody could see the usefulness of electricity, even in its most simple forms, and not realize that what they've just seen is going to change the world. They might not have predicted anything like computers and the reliance we have today, but it's pretty amazing. If it's something that's not likely to be going away, it's that much more valuable to get done soon. Especially when it's really nothing but a benefit to everybody it touches. (Insert electrocution joke here.)
3. An effect similar to a network effect: It's not like most of these people are just out living in the middle of the woods for fun; they're your farmers, ranchers and other suppliers. Helping them to do what they do more efficiently, more quickly, more cheaply, is going to have a direct impact on you. This is an especially valuable proposition when we're talking about infrastructure. It costs a lot to create, but most of its costs are upfront while its benefits carry through.
4. Government is going to have to be involved anyway, since at least in the case of power it's an infrastructure project that will, of necessity, not only cross town, city and county lines, but state lines as well. They're all going to get their hands in the soup to some degree anyway, but the less you have to deal with dozens or hundreds of entities and can deal with just one, the better it is for you as a consumer and for the provider as a business. That's not to mention that power, in particular, is a natural monopoly; you'd much rather have a single entity stringing lines up than each entity running a line out to each of its customers. Shared infrastructure is practically the definition of what a government should do, and do well.
And I'm sure there are more that others could come up with, in addition to what I mentioned before (that you can't necessarily count on industry to ever do it themselves and you basically just get lucky if things turn out to suddenly become profitable).
This is one of those things that sounds great when one says it (and it may even be worth saying), but is really impractical. The way I see it, there are three possibilities:
1) You believe the FBI is over-funded to adequately achieve its goals, in which case you should be looking to cut budget whether they're sending silly letters to Wikipedia or not.
2) You believe they are under-funded or 3) you believe they are adequately funded. In both cases you really can't cut their budget because you believe they need it.
All of this ignores the bad precedent of law enforcement budgets being subject to the political whims of the majority to decide if they are investigating or pursuing the right crimes (similar to the controversary about the firings of the prosecutors in the Bush administration seemingly for investigating and charging Republicans or not investigating or charging Democrats). Personally I want the FBI to investigate anything in its jurisdiction without fear of what the legislature might think. They should exercise more discretion than they seemed to in this case before deciding to proceed, but that's a different matter. One that, if it needs to be handled externally, could and should be handled by the Executive.
It's a fun sort of thing to haul a director into your office and smack around with, but you really can't actually do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it malfeasance and treachery?
I don't happen to agree with this guy's position. In fact I take almost the exact opposite position: Government should fund and own the lines, at least last mile, provide access to anybody who wants it for identical fees, and hire out a company or companies for maintenance work. Essentially turning Internet access into a public service.
But to me it just sounds like somebody who disagrees with me. The summary didn't call him one, but I'm pretty sure from reading his statements that he's a Republican. This is, by and large, the company line for them: Leave business alone so they can get the job done and pay people to do it.
That being the case, why shouldn't he author a bill to stop it? And why shouldn't he ask the cable companies what they think needs to be in the bill to protect them in the manner that he envisions? If his position is "government should stay the hell away from Internet access" then asking the people who provide Internet access what would (help) ensure that is not unreasonable.
We automatically jump to some sort of quid pro quo assumption. If that's true, yeah, impeach his ass -- then put him in jail. But barring evidence of that I don't have a problem with it that should lead to his impeachment. I wouldn't vote for him; not only based on his positions but based on the fact that it makes me question whether he's representing me or them. But that's a different matter, one up to the voters. It's not a criminal wrongdoing even if he IS on their side to the exclusion of mine. (Now if the state has a recall procedure that the citizens wanted to invoke, I would support such an attempt.)
In fact, didn't the system seem to work? He had his position, he asked his constituent (the cable company) what they needed, he authored a bill and put it to a vote. They voted it down and told him to take a seat. Seems like it worked like it should.
I love you so much for finding that source. I was just going to make a snarky reply about people making things up as they go to suit their arguments, but bitchslapping them with actual data is too good.
Sounds like a personal problem sir! Luckily there are supplements that may help you; consult your spam folder for more information.
I understand where you're coming from, but I do not agree.
What a law like this is, more than anything, is a recognition of the inherently unequal balance of power in a (potential) employer-employee relationship. Here in the US we tend to pretend that it's a mostly equal relationship and that all of this sort of thing is properly evaluated as part of the proffered salary. Some people really are studly enough that they can demand and receive anything they want from any employer they want, but the vast majority of the world isn't. In fact I'd be willing to bet the majority of workers simply feel lucky to have a job at all.
That being the case, if this law is worth passing then it's because privacy is worth protecting. Creating a law demanding respect for an employee's privacy and simultaneously writing in a loophole that almost any company would be able to exploit to completely ignore it has no value. They may as well not write the law; it's not helping anybody.
That's your opinion. It's not a bad one, not at all. In fact I am *this close* to agreeing with you.
What you're attempting to do is devise a system whereby the voters make the best choice. Ignoring the fact that that's one of the questions voting is meant to answer, that's a perfectly valid approach. After all, even if our candidate of choice doesn't win don't we want it to be because there was a difference of opinion from well-informed people rather than a slew of people voting on who has the best hair or something?
But another way of wording what you're saying is that stupid people don't deserve to be represented. It sounds perfectly reasonable that people who are illiterate, or who know nothing about the Constitution or civics or what-have-you shouldn't be involved with the construction of our government. But these people deserve to be represented. They deserve to be protected because they actually have a voice, and not because we their "betters" have deigned to protect them today. They deserve those protections even moreso when you consider that "illiterate" or "can't pass a civics test" frequently map along racial and socio-economic lines. In fact we did the whole poll/literacy testing thing in our history; it was used to prevent blacks from voting. The proposal essentially is to give the least voice to the people most likely to be helped by their government, instead preferring middle-to-upper class white guys because we know best.
I'm not accusing you or even your proposal of being racist, by the way. I fully believe you're putting it forward because you think it's the best, most reasonable system to decide who should be involved in electing our leaders and I really do respect that and your proposal in general, but I don't think the realities of the situation can be ignored. It's also worth mentioning that I've not yet brought up anything but an inherent bias in the system you proposed, whereas I think you could easily see where it could also be exploited, especially as the system establishes itself. It's a positive feedback loop for those deemed worthy: Those who have the power to vote are in charge of determining who gets the power to vote and what your exam entails. (As an aside, even your comment that "the federal government has no powers at all (AT ALL!) except those granted to it by the Constitution," while one I completely agree with, seems to be pushing an agenda of its own.) Of course that's going to be abused, and when the powerless ones feel they have no nonviolent means of correcting the issue, well, you've either made them slaves in all but name or you've forced them to violence. In all I think those are worse possibilities than the "yeah, go ahead and vote if you're 18" system gives.
I know that nonsense supports some peoples' world views, but that doesn't make it accurate.
Ignoring the possibility that it could reasonably be any number of other people and even a handful of other governments, maybe I'm naive, but I don't see why the US government would play games if they really cared that much. A terrible rape allegation that doesn't even stick for a day? Please. With billions of dollars of resources they could manufacture a significantly better, more serious charge with evidence that was hard to refute.
Personally, if I were in the government and wanted to put a stop to Wikileaks I wouldn't bother with that though. You'd simply find Assange in an ally with a bullet in the back of his head. Oh, there would be an uproar for a few days, maybe a few weeks, and lots of conspiracy theories (that for a change would actually be true!) but not only would it pretty much immediately slam the breaks on Wikileaks, it would be a chilling example to anybody who might consider stepping in behind him.
The "problem" with Wikileaks is that it doesn't need credibility, making some attempt to character-assassinate Assange on the worthless side. I don't like Assange, I'm not a huge fan of Wikileaks, and while I supported what they did with the original attack video I have no support whatsoever to give to leaking the Afghanistan documents or the manner in which it was done. Even with all that said I can't find them to lack credibility. They're releasing actual government documents, actual government video. I can have a problem with what they did, I can have a problem with how they did it, I can have a problem with some of the editorializing they do, but I can't claim it's somehow not credible. Other people are roughly the same; they think Wikileaks is scum or providing a public service.
So why waste the time and effort in some really bad plot? Live with it or end it. Don't play games.
Teachers shouldn't be essentially libeled by some claim that two cherry-picked metrics has anything to do with how good of a teacher they are.
For starters there's a Garbage In, Garbage Out problem. I know it's not politically correct to say these days, but some kids are simply stupid. Some are disinterested. Some are distracted by other situations, such as things going on at home. Some have terrible parents who don't care and who consider the school district to be solely responsible for their child's education during the 8 hours they provide the babysitting service, and have no interest whatsoever what happens when the service stops and they're forced to pick their kids up and bring them home for the rest of the day. None of these are the teachers' problems, nor theirs to solve. All will show up in their "performance metrics."
Second, many of these metrics are related to or exacerbated by socio-economic conditions. Will we really be surprised when--not if--most of the "best" teachers are found in upper-middle class neighborhoods? How is it an unbiased measure of anything when you completely ignore any and every factor other than the end result of some equation?
I'll give you a hint what looking at standardized math and English test scores does: It tells you have students did on their math and English standardized tests. Anybody extrapolating anything beyond that is wholly irresponsible and downright foolish. If this forthcoming article is anything like the summary suggests, these people do not deserve to be called journalists. They're nothing but little twats who evidently did better on their English than their math tests. Must have had poor teachers.
Many of them, yes. Why do you assume pedophiles are some higher intellectual class of criminal?
Excuse me sir, I have the 2000 Florida Presidential Election holding for you on line two.
I think you're grossly over-complicating it. They don't need to know what http means. For people for whom that is too difficult a task, they should just know that it (or https) should be there. And even then I'm not really sure what kind of attack you could pull off by changing the protocol, assuming that they know the rest of the tips.
They do need to know the resolution order, but only generically. "The rightmost part of a domain is the important part of where you're going" is going to protect against the vast majority of potential attacks, and all it requires teaching is where the domain stops (the first slash after "http://").
The font thing is really contrived, and easily avoided by simply informing users that what the link says isn't always where it goes, and that they should look at their browser bar to see where it's actually pointing. In fact this is something that needs to be pointed out rather than taught, since almost all web users have seen a link in this fashion with descriptive text instead of a URL. Nobody thinks that's going to "in this fashion," whatever that is, so they already intuitively know it; they just need to be informed that it can be used for nefarious purposes and where to see what it's actually pointing at.
Can software do this? Yes. Should it? Yes. Should users rely on it? No. Making it seem like users need to attend classes in order to protect themselves from simple attacks like this is disengenuous. All it takes is a modicum of effort, which is prohibitive enough these days it seems.
A trademark also only applies where it is in the same field and where there is a risk of consumer confusion.
Unless they are claiming that god has suddenly gone into the retail electronics or computer repair business, they're doing nothing but siccing lawyers on people without justification.
Fox News is the biggest cable news network in the United States. If Newscorp is failing or underperforming (I don't know if it is, but you imply such and I'll go with that) then it's almost certainly not due to Fox News in general or Beck and O'Reilly specifically.
I had the same problem happen, with some extremely sensitive data coming in.
In addition to somewhat mundane things like airline confirmations, hotel confirmations, etc, there were several letters about legal problems. The person they were trying to reach is apparently the head of an investment group and under investigation by the SEC. I also once received an email containing a bank account number with routing number. Usually it was sent to his (proper) business address and CC'd to my address, which I assume they thought was a personal address for him. When correspondence from lawyers starting coming in I decided it was well past time to start emailing these people and telling them to oh my god please stop. That's a can of worms I just wanted no part of whatsoever.
I did do a quick Google search for the guy; same last name, different first name (same first initial, the combination of which is my email address). Really a problem that shouldn't have happened, especially not that many times from that many different sources.
Getting details wrong is bad, of course. But they're asshats deserving both scorn and outright punishment not because of the (erroneous) perception of going after IP, but because they're abusing the legal system by pre-suing with nothing but a list of John Does.
In fact, this is worse than the tactics the RIAA use. At least in their case they were using the filing because they knew who they wanted to sue by IP and needed the court's authority to turn that into a name. These guys don't know anything about anybody; they're just supposing that it's going to happen and they want to expedite the process if it does. They're abusing the legal system, period. Their case should be dismissed with prejudice and their lawyers fined for that alone.
I've made a cost-benefit analysis that finding Assange, beating him unconscious in an alleyway, spiriting him back to a shack in the woods and torturing him to death does more good than allowing him to continue to make his cost-benefit analysis'. Oh, and I'm going to take his wallet while I'm at it 'cause, I mean shit, this is a lot of work. There should be something in it for me.
What damaging secrets? The video a few months ago, that was important. That was worth releasing. However I've seen nothing about these Afghanistan documents that is more than silly pedantry used as anti-war propaganda. An Afghan policeman got caught with hash and fired at Afghan troops? Stop the presses, there are stupid people overseas too! I mean I used to support this war but now? Ugh, let's get out!
I can't find a source anymore, but I recall hearing that good writing is strongly correlated with high intelligence. Maybe your evaluation is not as unreasonable as you suppose.
I agree. People claiming the Internet would become ubiquitous or that we would need to change how we do things to acommodate it probably had a good degree of foresight, and I will tend to agree with them.
But those claiming it would change everything about everything or that subsequent generations would be instantly computer geeks was horribly mistaken. People have always been able to appreciate the value of something without knowing (or caring) about every inner working. Not everybody is a car guy, not everybody can build a telephone, not everybody can fly a plane. Why should everybody be a computer or Internet expert?
That said, however, the comfort level is far higher. My mom is still paranoid about computers and the Internet; she hates it. She won't even get a debit card instead of her checks, much less do any sort of online banking -- even if it was only to keep an eye on her balances that way. My dad likes it, but he's hopeless and though I doubt he would admit it, I think he's afraid of making a mistake. I really don't know why. Just yesterday he forced me to help him sign up for some website like if he didn't do it right the world would end. But aaaanyway, myself and my brother are both computer geeks in differing degrees, my cousins (from 5 to 26) are all perfectly comfortable. Nobody I know from my generation is uncomfortable with it. They're not all good, but they like it and they're willing to be independent with it.
Why anybody would assume comfort would turn into mastery I can't say.
Just replying to myself because after re-reading that second paragraph it came off a little anti-homosexual. I didn't mean to imply that being gay was shameful or bad, merely that for people who already do believe that, that being associated with a gay person wouldn't be a good thing, especially given the specific circumstances of the situation I was referring to.
There are good reasons to care what people find out about you. I remember a few years ago, Ted Haggard was head of the National Association of Evangelicals, railing against homosexuals and gay marriage. Then it broke that he was paying a male masseuse for sex and meth.
Now in his case, he was still alive but imagine the same sort of thing comes to light after death instead. There's shame for his family (who presumably share his views), shame for his church, shame for the association. It destroys his credibility and undermines his church's and his organization's. Assuming he believes what he preached, it undermines his positions as well. You don't get to rail about how horrible homosexuals are, fuck your male masseuse, and claim to be some agent of God on the moral high ground.
That's just an example, of course. The point is that even if you're dead, you can still have an effect on the world and especially on your family, friends and community. A man's wife finding out he cheated on her is going to hurt her whether he's dead or not (in fact, perhaps more if he is because of the doubts it would cast on the entire relationship). And for what? It may have mattered in life, but it certainly doesn't in death.
Perhaps more to the point, that's not our decision to make. Dead or not, it's that person's life, that person's secrets. Most people won't care what people find out or think about them once they're dead, but some will -- and that's their choice. I'm not inclined to judge them for it.
I highly doubt the Supreme Court will hear the case.
To the best of my knowledge, there are not a plethora of conflicting lower court rulings on the issue. And while there is a constitutional question to be answered, I don't see it as wildly different than other cases they have decided such that it needs a separate ruling. These are the major criteria that the justices use to determine whether or not to hear the case.
Just because you are technically able to appeal up to them does not mean they will grant your petition for certiorari. In fact, about 98% of requests are not granted and their cases are unheard.
Spammers.
(Not necessarily a direct reply to you, just leaping off for my own experiences.)
My high school was quite affluent and always very strong academically. We were probably top 10 in the state in everything, and if I recall correctly we ended up having the most students who scored highly on the state standardized tests my junior year of high school. And thanks probably to exactly one teacher, we had what I would consider an extremely strong tech program. I think it was a really good basis for what a high school can do for the tech department, so let me share my recollections of having been involved in the vast majority of it as well as my interactions with the teacher responsible for most of it and things I've heard through him and in general.
1. Programming. We had two programming courses, one in Visual Basic (it was VB6 at the time I believe) and one in C++, and I took both. My high school was a large one; it had 3,000 students in two campuses of about 1,500 each. The year I took VB, it had three sessions (meaning about 75 students or 5% of the campus and 2.5% of the school), and C++ was worse with two sessions (about 50/3.3% of the campus). In neither one did the students really grasp anything, and most of them just talked about how much they hated it and how hard it was. The 3-4 students who actually seemed to enjoy it seldom walked out feeling like they had learned much because they were the ones who walked in interested in the subject. It wasn't a bad beginners course at all, but it struggled mightily to get anybody interested and even more mightily to get them to leave with much of value.
2. CCNA. Yup, we actually had a CCNA course. It was a heck of a commitment I admit; since it was a high school course they spread it out over four semesters, meaning you had to dedicate an elective slot to it for two of your four years at school. Still, everybody knew this in advance.
It was startlingly successful in terms of attracting students. I believe the first class had four or five sessions, so about 100-125 students. However it was not a generic networking class that perhaps it should have been; it was, legitimately, a CCNA certification program, meaning two things: First, that all of the material and exams came from Cisco and second, that it chewed up and spit out most students. They did their best to help students do well in terms of their grade in the course with a lot of fluff scores; if I remember correctly about 30% of the final mark was for periodically turning in a notebook that looked like you had done something other than sleep through the course, and though it was a CCNA prep and all the test scores came from Cisco's academy program, taking the exam was not required. It was a really good and really fun course. We had stacks of Cisco routers in the corners and frequent assignments involving programming them.
Part of the problem with this course was that the instructor I've mentioned a few times was one of two who taught it, and he wasn't the one I had. The one I had was truly terrible. I remember him teaching exactly twice; the rest of the time he was basically napping while you do the Academy coursework. To some degree this was expected (you HAD to do the Academy coursework and it was a big part of the course), but he took indifference entirely too far. Though I did well, I still felt like I was staring over when I got to the third course and back to the good teacher. And in fact that teacher felt the same way, because he planned about a week to go over CCNA 1 & 2 material but ended up taking closer to three.
By the time I got to CCNA 4, the difficulty of the course had taken its toll. The 100-125 students in CCNA 1 was down to 12 or 14 students. Technically speaking, that was against the school's policy for a course; it should have been canceled. But the teacher went to bat for us and ours was the last session of the course ever taught, having lasted 4 years (two times through the course). I was the only studen
Were you given the recording? Was it being thrown out and you salvaged it? Because absent something like that, you've stolen it -- and not in the "copyright infringement" sense of the word stole (though that will be true if you ever make a copy or play it publicly).
I'm not sure that's what he assumed. I think he's saying that you can't evaluate such a thing based on perfect hindsight. His assumption (or at least the point of conflict) would be that it's not something that should be left to chance as to whether or not the market ever decides, for whatever reason, to fill the void.
However, there are valid reasons. A sampling:
1. For the mail in particular, there is a network effect. My ability to send a letter next door is of extremely little value. My ability to send a letter to anybody in the country is significantly more valuable, and of course a tangential ability to send a letter almost anywhere in the world is more valuable yet. The more people connected to this service, the more valuable it is for each of them. This is also undoubtedly true of phone service, and true of Internet access as well.
2. Foresight. I'm sure there were skeptics, especially of whether or not something like the mail or electricity could be good businesses, but I don't think anybody could see the usefulness of electricity, even in its most simple forms, and not realize that what they've just seen is going to change the world. They might not have predicted anything like computers and the reliance we have today, but it's pretty amazing. If it's something that's not likely to be going away, it's that much more valuable to get done soon. Especially when it's really nothing but a benefit to everybody it touches. (Insert electrocution joke here.)
3. An effect similar to a network effect: It's not like most of these people are just out living in the middle of the woods for fun; they're your farmers, ranchers and other suppliers. Helping them to do what they do more efficiently, more quickly, more cheaply, is going to have a direct impact on you. This is an especially valuable proposition when we're talking about infrastructure. It costs a lot to create, but most of its costs are upfront while its benefits carry through.
4. Government is going to have to be involved anyway, since at least in the case of power it's an infrastructure project that will, of necessity, not only cross town, city and county lines, but state lines as well. They're all going to get their hands in the soup to some degree anyway, but the less you have to deal with dozens or hundreds of entities and can deal with just one, the better it is for you as a consumer and for the provider as a business. That's not to mention that power, in particular, is a natural monopoly; you'd much rather have a single entity stringing lines up than each entity running a line out to each of its customers. Shared infrastructure is practically the definition of what a government should do, and do well.
And I'm sure there are more that others could come up with, in addition to what I mentioned before (that you can't necessarily count on industry to ever do it themselves and you basically just get lucky if things turn out to suddenly become profitable).
This is one of those things that sounds great when one says it (and it may even be worth saying), but is really impractical. The way I see it, there are three possibilities:
1) You believe the FBI is over-funded to adequately achieve its goals, in which case you should be looking to cut budget whether they're sending silly letters to Wikipedia or not.
2) You believe they are under-funded or 3) you believe they are adequately funded. In both cases you really can't cut their budget because you believe they need it.
All of this ignores the bad precedent of law enforcement budgets being subject to the political whims of the majority to decide if they are investigating or pursuing the right crimes (similar to the controversary about the firings of the prosecutors in the Bush administration seemingly for investigating and charging Republicans or not investigating or charging Democrats). Personally I want the FBI to investigate anything in its jurisdiction without fear of what the legislature might think. They should exercise more discretion than they seemed to in this case before deciding to proceed, but that's a different matter. One that, if it needs to be handled externally, could and should be handled by the Executive.
It's a fun sort of thing to haul a director into your office and smack around with, but you really can't actually do it.